ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Lands seized by the ousted Ba’athi regime in the Nineveh province must be returned to their original Christian owners, a Christian politician said on Tuesday, stressing the need to prevent a demographic change in the area.
Ano Abdoka, the leader of Christian Alliance, told Rudaw’s Mustafa Goran that “the lands that belonged to Christians from their ancestors must be returned to Christians according to the law and the constitution.
“We want to preserve the demography of our towns so the Christians can return to their areas of origin,” he added.
His statement comes as an alliance of Christian political parties and organizations in Nineveh province on Monday announced a new initiative aimed at preventing the distribution of around 1,600 residential plots in Tel Kaif, northeast Mosul, arguing the move would alter the demographic makeup of the historically Christian town in Iraq's disputed Nineveh plains.
Abdoka’s Christian Alliance - a political coalition representing Christian parties in Iraq - said in a statement on Sunday the newly launched 'Tel Kaif Initiative' seeks to defend the area's Christian heritage and preserve its demographic diversity, with its immediate priority being to halt the allocation of land it says belongs to Christians.
"The first step of the Tel Kaif Initiative is to resolve the case of the 1,600 plots of land in the Tel Kaif district," Goran Sur, head of the Chaldean Global Association and a member of the coalition, told Rudaw's Hastyar Qadir. He added that the alliance would pursue legal measures through the Iraqi parliament to prevent what it describes as the seizure of the land.
Rudaw has learned that the Nieneveh provincial council has formed a committee to address the community’s concerns.
In 2000, the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council - under the leadership of the ousted dictator Saddam Hussien - issued decrees that seized thousands of residential and agricultural land plots belonging to indigenous Christian families across the Nineveh Plains, distributing them to Arab families as part of state-sponsored Arabization policies.
Although several Ba'athist decrees were technically suspended after ousting Hussein in 2003, many have never been formally revoked or repealed. As a result, title deeds and administrative registries in Nineveh Plain’s municipalities like Hamdaniya, Tel Keppe, Bartella, and Bashiqa remain legally contested.
The Ba’athi decision was revoked by Decree No. 12 of 2004. But the Christian Coalition said "several practical and administrative traces still remain in some government departments, which requires a comprehensive legal and administrative solution."
The initiative also cites a 2014 interpretation by Iraq's Federal Supreme Court of Article 23 of the constitution, which states that property registration must not be used to bring about demographic change. Paragraph 3 of the article explicitly prohibits "property registration for the purpose of demographic change."
The launch of the initiative comes just two weeks after Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi described the return of Christians displaced by decades of conflict as a national priority, pledging government support to encourage Christian families, business leaders and investors to return to their hometowns.
Iraq's Christian population has dwindled dramatically over the past two decades following sectarian violence after the 2003 US-led invasion and the Islamic State's (ISIS) 2014 offensive across Mosul and the Nineveh plains. Many members of the Assyrian-Chaldean-Syriac community continue to live abroad after successive waves of displacement.
.jpeg&w=3840&q=75)
